Solar Barn Roof Helps Dry Grain

Solar Barn Roof Helps Dry Grain ENERGY Solar 25-6-42 Werner Engler says that as a small farmer, he couldn't justify a big-fuel guzzling grain dryer. But he still needed some way to dry small quantities of wheat and canola. One day the Barrhead, Alberta, farmer took a look at the metal roof on his 32 by 100-ft. hog barn and decided there was plenty of heat there to dry grain if he could just collect it and funnel it into the bin. Engler put a 2,400-bu. bin at the end of the barn. He installed an 8-ft. square heavy steel screen on a 2 by 4 in. frame on the bin floor and then extended the framework across the floor and covered it with plywood so the floor would be level. Then he ducted a 3 hp aeration fan into the space under the screen. To get hot air from the hog barn attic to the bin, he made a 16-in. square duct from plywood and connected it to the intake side of the aeration fan. He didn't modify the hog barn roof. "Building it was not that difficult," he says. "And it's not expensive to operate. I've never measured the air temperature coming off the roof but when it's sunny, it's warm enough to reduce moisture content 0.5 percent per day, so I could dry wheat from 18 percent to 15 percent moisture in six days." Engler puts only about 2,000 bu. of grain into his drying bin at a time. "You have to be sure that once you turn the fan on, you don't turn it off until the grain is dry," he says. "It dries from the bottom up and you have to push the moisture all the way through the grain to dry the grain at the top." Engler says he usually moves the grain from the drying bin into another bin for storage once it's dry, even if he doesn't have more grain to dry, since sometimes it wasn't dried evenly and stores better if it's mixed. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Werner Engler, RR 1, Site 9, Box 1, Barrhead, Alberta T7N 1N2 Canada (ph 780 674-5866).

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